The distinction that has become standard between natural language and formal language, which rests on differentiating what is socially evolved and experiential from what is purposefully planned, suggests that a similar emphasis on experientiality may illuminate the distinction between narrative and formal modes of knowing, which figures prominently in this volume. Support for that perspective comes from developments in both narratology and computational linguistics. A key concept from both specialties – and for this volume – is that of ‘scripts’, which indicates how even texts that are explicitly formal may be understood as narratives by experienced readers. An explicit example that illuminates these themes comes from James Clerk Maxwell’s classic paper ‘On Faraday’s Lines of Force’. It juxtaposes narrative and formal modes of representation and displays their relative advantages, suggesting that the development of scientific knowledge often depends on continual feedback between natural narrative and formal analysis.

Narrative is ubiquitous in the sciences. Whilst it might be hidden, evident only from its traces, it can be found regularly in scientists’ accounts of their research, and of the natural, human and social worlds they study. Investigating the functions of narrative, it becomes clear that narrative-making provides scientists with a means of making sense of the materials in their field, that narrative provides a means of representing that knowledge and that narrative may even provide the site for scientific reasoning and knowledge claims. Narrative emerges as a ‘general-purpose technology’, used in many different forms in different sites of science, enabling scientists to figure out and to express their scientific knowledge. Understanding scientists’ use of narrative in this way suggests that narrative functions as a bridge between the interventionist practices of science and the knowledge gained from those practices.